Category Archives: Lesson Resources

Lesson plans, resources, tips, worksheets, professional development, classroom management.

Bill Gates: Teachers need real feedback

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Until recently, many teachers only got one word of feedback a year: “satisfactory.”

And with no feedback, no coaching, there’s just no way to improve.

In this TED Talk, Bill Gates suggests that even great teachers can get better with smart feedback — and lays out a program from his foundation to bring it to every classroom.


How does feedback take place in your school?

How often do you get observed?  Are the observations a useful way for you to improve as a teacher?

Share your thoughts and experience in the comments below.

Happy teaching!

Do it yourself, 3D hand

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Do it yourself, 3D hand

A fun activity for your students!

You could get them to write up a set of instructions for how to do this (Procedural Essay).

Example:

First, draw around your hand.

Secondly, draw horizonal lines across your hand, making curved lines to connect the left and right sides of your hand and fingers.
And so on….

Have you got any other ideas about how this could be used in an English lesson?

Free Lesson Plans & Resources (No Prep!)

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In this post I would like to share what I think are some of the most useful English teaching websites on the internet.  All these sites are free and are pretty much ready to use.

I have chosen these sites because I think they will enable you to deliver really great lessons, and hopefully inspire some new ideas for ways to take advantage of the huge amount of work that has gone into creating these ESL teaching resources.

StormtyperThe resources I like best tend to make use of technology in some way and may even be entirely web-based so you will need to make sure you will have an internet connection during the lesson or make provisions to download any web-based content to your computer beforehand.

There are others but my favourite to download YouTube videos is with www.savevid.com but you should be aware that doing so may contravene YouTube’s usage policy.

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How to Get Private English Students (and keep them!)

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Teaching Private English Lesson in TurkeyOne of the best ways to make money as an English teacher is by giving private lessons, and there is a huge demand for this in Turkey.  Many potential students of English have busy family and work lives which prevent them from attending an English course at the weekend or in the evenings.

However, they are keen to learn English and they may actually need to learn English for career development.  This need can be addressed through private lessons and many students will pay a serious premium to be taught 1-1 in their own home.

A great deal of money can be made this way, but starting from scratch isn’t easy. That said, if you know a few secrets and learn a few tricks of the trade you can make an excellent living, while at the same time staying in control of your working hours.

The challenge is that many teachers find that they get the odd private student here and there but they don’t stay on that long, and its hard to make a full time living.  There is a solution to this problem and there is a way to create a full time income that you are in control of.  Everything is explained below.

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How To Begin Whole Brain Teaching: 1

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I spent most of last year battling with students and I felt like I was wasting my time.  No matter how interesting and creative I made my lesson plans I could not get them settled long enough to teach them anything.

It was a hopeless situation and I was on the brink of quitting many times.  Pushed to my limits, I lost my temper several times and, with it, any shred of respect from the kids.

So I went in search of a solution.

I found a methodology which I had never come across before but instantly recognised as something which would address my specific challenges.

I was excited but also apprehensive.   

The method does require the teacher to step out of their comfort zone and try something new and this is never easy.  Especially if there is a class that you really dread going into.  The thought of doing something a little risky is pretty daunting.  So I started with a class I felt was one of the better ones.  More open to having fun and going along with something new.  The effect was incredible!  Virtually 100% student engagement in the lesson and 100% of the lesson time spent on topic.

I could not wait to try it with another class.  The results were the same.

And in the worst of worst classes…………… the results were even better!

 

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Teaching Vocabulary

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Teaching Vocabulary

Its easy to get stuck using the same tired old methods of teaching vocabulary, so its worth reading up a little on different approaches and activities to raise your awareness of some other options you could adapt to your lessons.

Vocabulary is vital to successful communication and will also allow your students to access a wider range of materials and stimulus (authentic readers, videos, newspapers, magazines) which will increase the pleasure of learning, and using, a language.

It could be argued that using the correct words in a sentence without any grammatical structure at all could still lead to a successful interaction. 

For example compare,  ’airconditioning, leak’ to ‘house, problem’.  I know I have survived many challenging situations in foreign countries using this method!

Students at school should be aiming to acquire at least 400 new words a year.  Doing so with the ability to not only recognise these words, but produce them correctly in written and spoken exchanges will require the teacher resorting to a variety of methods and sufficient repetition beyond the odd game of hangman!

Here are a few useful links for teaching vocabulary.

http://www.increasevocabulary.net/make-words-relevant.html

http://buildvocabulary.org/index.php

http://jc-schools.net/tutorials/vocab/strategies.html

Do you have any good ideas or useful resources for teaching vocabulary?